Former death-row inmate, legendary jailhouse lawyer, and co-editor for the award-winning The Angolite newspaper Billy Sinclair looks back on his prison experience and discusses what his priorities are now.

Billy Hayes, the writer of Midnight Express, candidly discusses his memoir about escaping from a Turkish prison in the 1970s, the pros and cons of having your story adapted by Hollywood, and what the War on Drugs has meant for incarceration.

Piper Kerman is the author of the memoir Orange is the New Black, a story of how, years after running money for an international heroin gang, she was indicted, convicted, and did time in a federal women’s prison.

J.M. Benjamin spent more than twelve years in state and federal prisons in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. But he read and read in prison, and eventually wrote more than a dozen urban fiction novels.

Rumpus Original Column

Cullen Thomas is the author of Brother One Cell, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and one of World Hum's Best Travel Books of the Year. His writing has appeared in GQ, the New York Times Magazine, the Daily Beast, and Foreign Policy. He teaches The Dark Side: Crime and Punishment in Literature at New York University.

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